WebSpeed Déjà Vu—Why WebSpeed is Turning Heads Again

WebSpeed has long been a rock-solid and efficient piece of the OpenEdge platform, and made waves when it debuted. A new version is doing this all over again.

I have been with Progress for over 20 years now. I started in Tech Support learning Progress version 6 and 7. It was a very busy and exciting time. Never was it more so than in my second year when a new product was released, WebSpeed. Then things at Progress got even busier. 

WebSpeed had everyone calling Tech Support to ask questions like: What is this WebSpeed product, how many WebSpeed agents do I need and, what is a web server and how do I get one? Considering WebSpeed started out as a fix for a bug, it was a huge hit!

During the next several years WebSpeed was one of our fastest growing products as the commerce side of the internet also grew. Legacy character-based code could easily be modified to interact with a web browser. It was the quickest way to get a graphical interface. I would go to users’ conferences, technical conferences, the Progress User Conferences and ask, “Who is using WebSpeed,” and almost every hand in the room would go up!

Fast forward 15 years and WebSpeed was pretty much unchanged. Sure, every time OpenEdge enhanced our client the WebSpeed client benefited too, but WebSpeed had changed from a celebrity to the hard working application feature that was a staple of OpenEdge.

PAS for OpenEdge and WebSpeed

Then came the new Progress Application Server  (PAS for short) for OpenEdge.  In 11.5 we introduced this new version of our classic AppServer, with many great features to make you want to move from classic AppServer to PAS for OpenEdge AppServer. 

PAS for OpenEdge offered better performance by using less memory and CPU process time. With Spring Security built-in, deploying your application to the internet had never been safer. The new PAS for OpenEdge was easy to manage, deploy and monitor using industry standard tools. If you built web applications then PAS for OpenEdge was for you—it was designed to develop, deploy and manage web applications.

All this is great, but wait… was there no WebSpeed in PAS for OpenEdge 11.5? Nope, a little time was needed before the new WebSpeed would be ready.

The New WebSpeed

A much improved WebSpeed was added in version 11.6 of PAS for OpenEdge, and it has all the same benefits of the 11.5 PAS for OpenEdge and much more. Except for some small print, the new WebSpeed will run your classic WebSpeed application code with little or no changes!

The new WebSpeed is now a more modern web application ready for all of your internet needs. It has the ability to support all of the HTTP verbs (whereas Classic WebSpeed only supported GET and POST). Also, the new WebSpeed uses JSON for its default.  This makes B2B more straightforward, and also makes WebSpeed a new possibility for REST applications. In fact, several customers have already re-written Classic REST applications in the WebSpeed in PAS for OpenEdge!

This is possible not only because of JSON formatting, but also because of the new WebHandler classes of WebSpeed. Using the WebHandlers you can design your outwardly facing URL scheme and then write your application.

The new WebHandler is OOABL, is extensible and all the source code is included for your reference.

Finally, the JSON output also allows for easy integration with Kendo UI for the Web.  This allows for more modern web applications with the great Kendo UI tools.

It’s Déjà Vu—WebSpeed is Back

So it déjà vu all over again. WebSpeed is the hot new product with customers, who are migrating existing applications and writing new applications that only PAS for OpenEdge WebSpeed can fill. You can learn more about PAS for OpenEdge and WebSpeed by checking out this brief.